Surprising Ways to Open a Bottle of Wine Without an Opener

You’ve got your snacks, your sense of adventure, the incredible view you drove up a windy road for an hour to achieve, and your bottle of wine (Editor's note: presumably from your most recent wine club shipment) . But oops….no wine opener!

That’s okay: here are some surprising ways you can open a bottle of wine without an opener.

With a wire coat hanger

If you have a wire coat hanger, straighten and bend the hook of it so that it looks like a fishhook—so it will have a much smaller round at the top of the hook. Then, push the hook into the cork until it gets to the bottom of it, with the bottom of the hook escaping the bottom of the cork, hooking it. Pull the hook out and the cork should come with it.

With a shoe and a wall

You almost definitely have the two things required for this trick (unless you were trying to connect with nature and carried your picnic barefoot out into a field.) Remove the protective seal from your bottle, and stick the bottle (with the bottom of it in the soul of the shoe) into either a men’s dress shoe or a sneaker. Firmly begin banging the bottom of the shoe, while holding the bottle securely in it, against a wall. The pressure against the bottom of the bottle will begin to pop out the cork at the top.

With a phone book

Many of the same physics of the shoe trick will work with a book. Take a very thick book like a phone book, and pound the bottom of the wine bottle onto the top of the book, as you pound the book onto the wall. Hopefully you don’t do it on the wall you share with a neighbor. The cork should begin to pop out.

With a screw and a hammer

Just as you would put a screw part way into a wall to hang a poster string from, and then later remove that screw with the back of a hammer so your landlord doesn’t get mad you broke the “no nailing things into the wall” rule, you can remove a wine cork. Just twist a screw about two thirds of the way into the cork, leaving about half an inch out, and then with the back of a hammer, pull out the screw. The cork will come with it.

With three nails and a hammer

If you don’t have a screw, you can take three or four nails and jam them into the top of the cork, with about half an inch of the nails exposed. Then slide the back of a hammer over the nails, yank them all out at once and the cork will come with them.

With a knife

Take a knife and insert it into the top of the cork, at about a 45-degree angle. So you want the knife to be going in the direction of the inner wall of the bottleneck, opposite of its entrance point. Once you have it as far in as it can go, begin to twist the knife handle around, and you’ll see the cork begin to twist out as well. Push in the cork If you plan on drinking the entire bottle today, you don’t need to salvage the cork. In that case, you can just use a knife, or even the bottom of a blunt, long object to push the cork into the bottle, rather than trying to get it out.

With a shoe string

Tie a thick knot in a shoe string. Next, bore a hole down the center of the cork—with maybe a screw or nail. Shove the knotted string down the hole in the cork, so the knot sort of anchors itself underneath the cork in the bottle. Pull out the string with all your might and the cork will come along.